English Phonetics Diary (4)

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3d2U01e71I

The video I’ve decided to watch this week focuses on activities to teach phonemic awareness. As the one in the previous week, it’s by Susan Jones - former literacy and early education teacher. She talks about various activities to introduce to learners at different stages of phonemic awareness.

Susan Jones introduces six types of activities for phonemic awareness:

1. Phoneme isolation
2. Blending
3. Segmentation
4. Addition
5. Deletion
6. Substitution

At each of them, there are specific activities for learners. For example, blending the phonemes requires students to connect the sounds they hear to make a word. Once they’re able to do so, the teacher asks them to name the separate phonemes. Then, new words are created on the basis of those previously taught. Most of the activities proposed by Susan Jones are short and not time-consuming. It’s important that students work with words listened to and not written down. These activities don’t teach them to associate the sound with the letter or letters.

Overally, it was another helpful material. I think those kinds of activities would be helpful as they are quite simple and don’t require much preparation from the teacher. Students won’t get bored, as it’s only a few minutes. Also, if they practise the sounds before seeing the written form, it should be easier for them to differentiate phonemes from letters. Once the letters are introduced, and the word is written down, it can be a challenge to understand why sometimes two letters create one phoneme. I think I may continue to explore this topic next week, but I’m waiting for our class to discuss it with my colleagues and draw some ideas from their experiences.